Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Horrors of the Sea!

Between Bermuda Triangle, horrifying deep sea creatures, cryptid monsters, mermaids, haunted lighthouses, shipwrecks, ghost ships and more - the sea is the location of a great deal of horror!

I think the sea is the most amazing mystery. We float atop of it, but beneath is a world of mystery and death.

Flying Dutchman

This legend involves a ghost that sank 1641 off the Cape of Good Hope. The captain cursed the ship as it was sinking that he would continue to sail it to doomsday. The legend became a ship forced to sail the seas for an eternity. The movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" portrayed this concept quite nicely. Many areas of the ocean and even the Great Lakes have tales of the Flying Dutchmen.

Japanese Ghost Ship

This ghost ship was found adrift a year after the Japanese earthquake. Gives one chills to imagine ships with no one sailing them.

Amelia Earhart

This 1930s female pilot in a male-dominated field, wanted to push her records at flight again and again. In 1937, she decided she wanted to try to fly around the world. What happened next has remained a great aviation mystery even 80 plus years later. Over the Pacific, she went into radio silence and was never heard or seen from again. There were a lot of theories that the Japanese shot her down and took her as a prisoner of war, that she landed on an island and lived there until finally passing, or that she simply ran out of gas. One thing we learn as we study these sea-related creepy things, the water hides its victims and at sea there are no witnesses.

Shipwrecks

The largest loss of life in a single ship disaster in the US was considered the wreck of the SS Eastland on the Chicago River in Illinois in 1915. When all was said and done, 844 passengers lost their lives on what was going to be a festive occasion. The precariously built ship had a narrow hull and when loaded with over 2500 passengers and new post-Titanic regulation for lifeboats which were mounted high, it pitched one way and another with the weight of the passengers shifting on the deck. It finally listed onto its side and the effects were tragic.

Philadelphia Experiment

I

Here’s the concept for the Philadelphia Experiment:

The legend revolves around a supposed 1943 experiment led by the Navy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on a ship called the USS Eldridge. According to the tale, this was an attempt at trying out the unified field theory laid out by Albert Einstein. The idea was to find a way to bend light around an object so it becomes invisible, thus making an ideal warship in dealing with the enemy during WWII. The ship was reported to be rigged with four immense generators along with Tesla coils, electron tubes and many miles of inch-thick cable running throughout the ship’s cables.

The ship took off from Philly to Norfolk, turning on this equipment, whereupon it was shrouded in a green fog and then disappeared. This resulted in an accidental teleportation back to Philly from Norfolk. When the ship arrived, accounts say that the men were in agony, sick, mentally crippled, and many were dead, some even fused to the hull of the ship!

Although it made for a fantastic movie (a must see), the Philadelphia Experiment is regarded by the military as a bunch of hooey. There’s still conspiracy folks who hang onto it and, why not? After all, aren’t we the folks who sent chimps into space? Had our own astronauts burn on a launch pad? Tested nuclear weapons with visitors gazing upon the glory on the New Mexico sands? Dropped bombs on Japan that caused huge devastation? Built a secret base in Nevada? It doesn’t seem our government/military has a lot of boundaries when it comes to our individual welfare, only our welfare as a conglomerate(save our country), screw the individuals (people are expendable, countries are not). So, there is that excuse for people to hang onto the notion of such an horrendous experiment.

Bermuda Triangle

This region in the Atlantic has supposedly claimed the lives of thousands of people over the centuries, and yet according to statistics, it is not even one of the top 10 most dangerous areas in the seas around the world. Yet, the mystique of it has been built up over the decades of people reporting strange fogs, instruments that won't work, even an entire squadron of planes going missing during military exercises. Explanations have ranged from a portal to another dimension, electromagnetic earth issues, alien intervention, time travel, and more. The actual source of all these missing and wrecked ships and planes hasn't been identified absolutely, but on any given part of the ocean, we are likely to find a great pile of similar missing vessels.

Sea Monsters

Mermaids, dinosaur-like creatures, giant octopus; all reported throughout time including the ancient tales of sirens luring sailors onto the rocks. With all the unknown beneath them, bad weather, lack of supplies, fear of getting lost, there were lots of reasons for sailors to develop tales over the centuries to explain misfortune. Some of the tales are quite romantic, like the half female/half fish mermaid, and some are more terrifying, like giant octopus taking down a ship. Today, we still find odd things upon the beach and have to wonder....

Haunted Lighthouses

Why are lighthouses reportedly so haunted? Is it the isolation? The shipwrecks? The fog? Is it the cylindrical shape combined with pounding water on the rocks and a huge amount of power to produce the light creating a nature-made battery? Whatever the explanation, some lighthouses get a real reputation and perhaps one that had their reputation jump overnight for being featured on a very chilling episode of "Ghost Hunters" was St. Augustine Lighthouse in Florida that saw a few deaths and had a lot of reported phenomena. While there, the team captured a shadow figure that seemed to move many floors at once and a woman screaming for help, as well as whispered conversations.

Deep Sea Creatures

The sea comes up with some weird creatures, but the deeper you go, the weirder they get -

Carroll A. Deering

The Carroll A. Deering was a 5-masted ship that in 1921 came aground in Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, with all the crew missing. It was one of the greatest sea mysteries. There are many theories from piracy to Bermuda Triangle and everything in between. The log and navigation equipment, life rafts and personal belongings were all gone from the ship. Yet, the galley showed foods in various states of meal preparation. It still remains a sea mystery whispered about in wonder and fear.

Mary Celeste

In 1872, the merchant ship, “Mary Celeste” sailed left in November from New York to Genoa. On December 5th, halfway between the Azores and Portugal, the captain of the ship “Dei Gratia” sighted the Mary Celeste ship that he recognized. The only problem was it was riding out of control which was not at all something the ship’s pious and stern captain, Benjamin Spooner Briggs, would have ever allowed. The captain hailed the other ship, but for hours he got no response.

He then set off on a small boat with some men to board her.

The men found the ship to be seaworthy and having the appearance of being left in a rush. The investigating captain’s impression by the possessions left behind is that the crew left in a rush for fear the ship was sinking. The ship had contained 7 crewmen, the captain, the captain’s wife, and his small child.

Over the years, this story has become filled with tales of steaming cups of coffee and food on the stove and such being found. This was not the actual case. Here is what the captain of the “Dei Gratia” found:

One pump out of order
Two hatches off and a fair amount of water between the decks
The clock and compass were destroyed
No alcohol was found on board
The chronometer and sextant were not found on board
The ship’s register and captain’s log were both gone
The stove was off kilter and dishes strewn and lots of water in the galley
There were no boats on board

We’re left with many theories from a small explosion caused by munitions onboard to a rogue wave, and the fact that there had been strong storms for days that may have overwhelmed the ship’s capabilities. With the crew and captain and his family exiting on the small boats, they would have become victims of the rough sea.

Many legends have continued about the ship being a victim of some supernatural occurrence of the Bermuda Triangle variety. Even though these were dismissed, the fact remains; for a time the Mary Celeste was a ghost ship in the true sense, wandering the sea without a crew.

But why?

Flying Dutchman Ship

The Flying Dutchman ship has been spotted many times in the last two centuries, with the late King George V of England writing a detailed account of his own sighting in 1880 off the coast of Australia: "At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her...At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms."

Why do ghost ships seem like such romantic images? Perhaps because if the crew is not aboard, it is still sailing with no one to handle it. Where is the crew? Davy Jones' locker, huh? You can take a person out of a car, but the car will crash. A ship, could float months, even years, without facing doom and sinking or even being found. It's a vast ocean out there!

The Mary Celeste (or Marie Céleste as it is fictionally referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others after him) was a brigantine merchant ship famous for having been discovered on 4 December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean unmanned and apparently abandoned, despite the fact that the weather was fine and her crew had been experienced and able seamen. The Mary Celeste was in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She had been at sea for a month and had over six months' worth of food and water on board. Her cargo was virtually untouched and the personal belongings of passengers and crew were still in place, including valuables. The crew was never seen or heard from again. Their disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time.

The fate of her crew has been the subject of much speculation. Theories range from alcoholic fumes, to underwater earthquakes, to waterspouts, to paranormal explanations involving extraterrestrial life, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), sea monsters, and the phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle, although the Mary Celeste is not known to have sailed through the Bermuda Triangle area. The Mary Celeste is often described as the archetypal ghost ship, since she was discovered derelict without any apparent explanation, and her name has become a synonym for similar occurrences.

Here's a real ghost ship going astray -

I'd suggest you watch "The Fog" (original) if you're in the mood for a ghost ship now.

1 comment:

for a ghost ship to appear a number of events need to happen like: creepy fog rolling in, ghostly light and cries, sometimes a ship rising out of the ocean or mysteriously appearing out of nowhere, or having a ghostly glow around the ship with fog around it

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ABOUT ME

Sharon Day is a researcher, author, working in oil and gas industry equipment sales, equity investing and promoting of disruptive technologies. She is also co chair of a film industry group working on films..

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